We stood on the spot where the cemetery used to be. “He didn’t want to live next to a cemetery, so he had all the people dug up and moved.” Our tour guide read from a stapled stack of pages, researched by another Kansas City historian. Our tour was “Wicked Westport,” and it was, as I suspected, badly behaved.
If you’re not from here, Kansas City began as two places, one on the river, and one a little piece away. The “little piece away” part was Westport. Would that have been a better name for Kansas City? Absolutely not. There are way too many Westports out there.
Right on the river was not a good place to hang because there were all these limestone cliffs. A little piece away was better. Flat. Easy. Westport grows into the town of Kansas, and Kansas grows into Westport, and today Westport is a neighborhood of Kansas City.
Our tour guide told us about a mother who tried to have her daughters arrested so they could not go join a cult in Maine. She was unsuccessful. Neither daughter ever returned to the midwest. Americans have always loved cults!
I have an abiding interest in the dead, probably by way of my great-grandfather Art Stieren. The Paris catacombs, a newly created spot to keep their dead when they ran out of burying room in the churchyards: amazing! Westport, too, had a cemetery, and they decided they needed to move it.
The hilarious thing about the Old Westport cemetery being moved is that there was plenty of room. There was nothing but room. This was the west. Our city still has way, way more room than it needs. Even in its urban core. This is the West, baby!
“A lot of people think they didn’t move all the graves. There were so many bones here that they said kids would play with them,” our tour guide said.
The other hilarious thing is that there is no cemetery in Westport, so there isn’t any need, really, to call it “Old,” in fact, it is more like the “Former Westport Cemetery.” I digress.
I used to live near Union Cemetery, which I thought of as ‘the old cemetery,” but it was the successor to the cemetery in Westport. From what I could tell, the cemetery was on the same spot as our beloved World Market (we don’t have very many shops around here, okay) and a hotel where I once attended a work training. We were practicing using a rating system for infant and toddler classrooms called (unappetizingly) the ITERS.
The handling of human remains always fascinates me because it’s right where “it doesn’t matter at all” meets “it matters a great deal.”Somewhere.
They don’t allow the dead in Westport anymore. People might die here, but they can’t stay.
My history of Westport: the former location of the best ice cream in town, Murray’s. I often went there with friends in my twenties, and we ate our cones while perusing the issues of People and US that they offered. One day, my friend was driving us somewhere for work, and smoke started coming out from under the hood. She nursed the car along until we got to the ice cream place. We walked up to the door, and a sign said their power was out. We got ice cream, and then we sat eating it, and dripping with sweat.
I was on my way to Murray’s when I heard on the radio that Michael Jackson had died. Shocking, sad, and also queasy feelings. Did I think he was a child molester? Yes. Did I love his music? Yes.
One night while in line for ice cream, a friend leaned on a gumball machine, the glass broke, and gumball shrapnel shot all over the place.
The friend who broke the glass never entered the place again. He was a guy we used to play tag with, when my sister ran the Tag Institute, a local group that was way more fun than kickball, I gotta tell ya. That guy had a Geo Tracker, which was a car that was more like a skateboard.
Murray’s served the best chocolate cheesecake flavored ice cream in the known universe. I miss it to this day.
People have fretted about violence in Westport my whole life. It has always been known as a “dangerous” area, to varying degrees. They close down the streets at a certain time, Friday and Saturdays. Just a week ago, two men were shot and killed.
I ache that Americans are so violent, and in an odd way it soothes me to remember people are violent, and people have always been violent.
When we were younger, my attitude was, don’t be an amateur. Park outside the perimeter. Don’t drive through the police checkpoint. Start early and leave around midnight, especially on the weekends.
Standing on another corner, we heard stories of people drunk-driving horses, people shooting each other, and most boldly, setting each others’ buildings on fire, a crime I would say we have pretty well licked. In the ’70s in Kansas City, when we had our mafia heyday, people went pretty hard. Not anymore.
We walked past the bar where friends and I have spent a hundred or more hours drinking and talking. “Remember that time we broke the chair?” I said.
“Oh, yeah, at Cheval.”
“No,” I said. “At Harry’s.” At Harry’s, we have sat through snowstorms, watching ill-equipped cars attempt to parallel park. Back, and forth. Back, and forth. Nope.
Two chairs have been broken in nearby bars, yes, but neither time on purpose, or because of any bad behavior. They just had rickety furniture. Really.
We walked past the restaurant where we had met after one of us had survived an unbelievable accident. One of us in a neck brace, but all of us there, which felt like a miracle. I ate my usual pea ravioli. We all drank wine. We sat in amazement. I wore a top with a blurry yellow and black floral print.
We walk past the bar where I met a friend after an awful breakup. I remember sitting in that bar and thinking, again and again, he’ll answer me. I was in that stage where I was deeply codependent, but pretending not to be. “I can’t do this, this can’t be happening,” I remember thinking, as I checked my phone for the millionth time, praying for a text response that (thank goodness in retrospect) never came.
We stood in front of the old house that was relocated to become the Historical Society. Main and Westport Road was a prime spot. It’s had an old drugstore on one corner for longer than I’ve been alive, Katz’s/Scagg’s/Osco. You could tell the age of every toiletry or first aid bit in my childhood home by which name in the sequence was on the price tag. The old house is on a side street now, the historical society headquarters.
Aside: I’ll write about Katz’s another time, but: 1) he invented the modern “drugstore,” by which we mean, place you can buy a birthday card, vegetable oil, and aspirin, and 2) he was a prominent Jewish philanthropist in Kansas City.
In front of the Historical Society house, there is a plaque set in the concrete that says, “Hattie,” and lists the years she was enslaved in the house. “She stayed with the family her whole life, though,” the tour guide explains.
Colonel Charles Jennison, a supporter of John Brown, had his battle headquarters in the old house. Kansas City narrowly escaped being a Confederate town. Jackson County went Free State, while some other parts of Missouri leaned heavily pro-slavery.
I have some pride in my pro-union past, though I had nothing to do with it, and neither did my ancestors. They were either still in Europe, or Canada, or Kentucky, and some of them did enslave people.
I hear that the pile of amputated limbs supposedly rose up to the second floor of the hotel where they treated the wounded. I hear that the pile of Confederate dead was eventually moved. Many of them were difficult to identify.
I enjoyed hearing about someone from Mexico mixing it up in Westport in the 1800s, and our tour guide said, “There were people from all over here. From the south, from Europe, and native people.” For a while, people from all over were passing through, passing through, passing through.
The Civil War comes and goes. The railroad means people traveling through the area don’t plod through, slowly and hungrily, but hop on and off trains. The trains move from the cow stank infested West Bottoms to Union Station, and Mr. Katz gets busy setting up his drugstores.
In my lifetime, Westport goes from being a bustling shopping and drinking and eating neighborhood to a straight-up partying neighborhood, and then settles considerably with the opening of a new entertainment district downtown. At some point, I have a drink at Kelly’s, in the second-oldest building. I drive by the sculptures of the Good White Men who made things happen. In football season, they wear team jerseys.
But most of my Westport time is spent drinking coffee and reading and writing at Broadway Cafe. Hours and hours and hours and days. Fretting over how the bank was torn down on the southeastern corner of Westport and Broadway, so now it’s hard to park. Its replacement building goes up until at coffee, we have no more direct sun. I first listened to my music on a Discman here. Sometimes I bought a CD at Pennylane Records (or Streetside Records) and came directly to coffee to listen to it.
I go from reading the paper on paper to rarely reading the paper on paper. Broadway Cafe still has an NYT subscription, and sometimes I still grab a piece to touch the news. Which I prefer.
Going On 